Microprocessor Progression: Intel

The first microprocessor to make it into a home computer was the Intel 8080, a complete 8-bit computer on one chip, introduced in 1974. The first microprocessor to make a real splash in the market was the Intel 8088, introduced in 1979 and incorporated into the IBM PC (which first appeared around 1982). If you are familiar with the PC market and its history, you know that the PC market moved from the 8088 to the 80286 to the 80386 to the 80486 to the Pentium to the Pentium II to the The Intel 8080 was the first microprocessor in Pentium III to the Pentium 4. All of these microprocessors are a home computer. made by Intel and all of them are improvements on the basic design of the 8088. The Pentium 4 can execute any piece of code that ran on the original 8088, but it does it about 5,000 times faster! The following table helps you to understand the differences between the different processors that Intel has introduced over the years.
Name 8080 8088 80286 80386 80486 Pentium Date Transistors Microns 1974 1979 1982 1985 1989 1993 6,000 29,000 134,000 275,000 1,200,000 3,100,000 6 3 1.5 1.5 1 0.8 Clock speed 2 MHz 5 MHz 6 MHz 16 MHz 25 MHz 60 MHz Data width 8 bits 16 bits 8-bit bus 16 bits 32 bits 32 bits 32 bits 64-bit bus 32 bits 64-bit bus 32 bits 64-bit bus 32 bits 64-bit bus 32 bits 64-bit bus MIPS 0.64 0.33 1 5 20 100

Pentium II

1997

7,500,000

0.35

233 MHz

~300

Pentium III

1999

9,500,000

0.25

450 MHz

~510

Pentium 4 Pentium 4 "Prescott"

2000 42,000,000

0.18

1.5 GHz

~1,700

2004 125,000,000

0.09

3.6 GHz

~7,000

Intel 8080
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Intel 8080

An Intel C8080A processor. Produced mid 1974 Common manufacturer(s) Intel Max. CPU clock rate 2 MHz Instruction set pre x86 Package(s) 40-pin DIP

AMD clone AM9080.

NEC 8080AF (second source). The Intel 8080 was the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel and was released in April 1974. It was an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibility. The initial specified clock freqency limit was 2 MHz and with common instructions having execution times of 4,5,7,10 or 11 cycles this meant a few hundred thousand instructions per second. The 8080 has sometimes been labeled "the first truly usable microprocessor", despite the fact that earlier microprocessors were used for calculators and other applications. The 8080 was implemented using non-saturated enhancement-load NMOS, demanding an extra +12 volt and a -5 volt supply.

The original Pentium Pentium Vitals Summary Table

Introduction date: March 22, 1993 Process: 0.8 micron Transistor Count: 3.1 million Clock speed at introduction: 60 and 66 MHz Cache sizes: L1: 8K instruction, 8K data Features: MMX added in 1997 The original Pentium is an extremely modest design by today's standards, and when it was introduced in 1993 it wasn't exactly a blockbuster by the standards of its RISC contemporaries, either. While its superscalar design (Intel's first) certainly improved on the performance of its predecessor, the 486, the main thing that the Pentium had going for it was x86 compatibility. In fact, Intel's decision to make enormous sacrifices of performance, power consumption, and cost for the sake of maintaining the Pentium's backwards compatibility with legacy x86 code was probably the most strategicallyimportant decision that the company has ever made. The choice to continue along the x86 path inflicted some serious short- and medium-term pain on Intel, and a certain amount of long-term pain on the industry as a whole (how much pain depends on who you talk to), but as we'll see the negative impact of this critical move has gradually lessened over time. The Pentium's two-issue superscalar architecture was fairly straightforward. It had two five-stage integer pipelines, which Intel designated U and V, and one six-stage floatingpoint pipeline. The chip's front-end could do dynamic branch prediction, but as we'll learn in a moment most of its front-end resources were spent on maintaining backwards compatibility with the x86 architecture.

Intel 8086
The 8086[1] (also called iAPX86) is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and mid-1978, when it was released. The 8086 gave rise to the x86 architecture of Intel's future processors. The Intel 8088, released in 1979, was a slightly modified chip with an external 8-bit data bus (allowing the use of cheaper and fewer supporting logic chips[2]), and isnotable as the processor used in the original IBM PC.

Intel 80286
The Intel 80286[1] (also called iAPX 286), introduced on February 1, 1982, was a 16-bit x86 microprocessor with 134,000 transistors. Like its contemporary simpler cousin, the 80186, it could correctly execute most software written for the earlier Intel 8086 and Intel 8088.[2] It was employed for the IBM PC/AT, introduced in 1984, and then widely used in most PC/AT compatible computers until the early 1990s.

Intel 80386
The Intel 80386, also known as the i386, or just 386, was a 32-bit microprocessor introduced by Intel in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistors and were used as the central processing unit (CPU) of many workstations and high-end personal computers of the time. As the original implementation of the 32-bit extension of the 8086 architecture, the 80386 instruction set, programming model, and binary encodings are still the common denominator for all 32-bit x86 processors. This is termed x86, IA-32, or the i386-architecture, depending on context. The 80386 could correctly execute most code intended for earlier 16-bit x86 processors such as the 8088 and 80286 that were ubiquitous in early PCs. Following the same tradition, modern 64-bit x86 processors are able to run most programs written for older chips, all the way back to the original 16-bit 8086 of 1978. Over the years, successively newer implementations of the same architecture have become several hundreds of times faster than the original 80386 (and thousands of times faster than the 8086).[1] A 33 MHz 80386 was reportedly measured to operate at about 11.4 MIPS.[2] The 80386 was launched in October 1985, but full-function chips were first delivered in the third quarter of 1986.[3][4] Mainboards for 80386-based computer systems were cumbersome and expensive at first, but manufacturing was rationalized upon the 80386's mainstream adoption. The first personal computer to make use of the 80386 was designed and manufactured by Compaq[5] and marked the first time a fundamental component in the IBM PC compatible de facto-standard was updated by a company other than IBM. In May 2006, Intel announced that 80386 production would stop at the end of September 2007.[6] Although it had long been obsolete as a personal computer CPU, Intel and others had continued making the chip for embedded systems. Such systems using an 80386 or one of many derivatives are common in aerospace technology, among others. Some mobile phones also used the 80386 processor, such as BlackBerry 950[7] and Nokia 9000 Communicator. 80386 processors also were used in some computers with very narrowscoped functions, which can hardly be classified as "personal computer", such as Mixlink.

Intel 80486
The Intel 80486 microprocessor (alias i486 or Intel486) was a higher performance follow up on the Intel 80386. Introduced in 1989, it was the first tightly[1] pipelined x86 design as well as the first x86 chip to use more than a million transistors, due to a large on-chip cache and an integrated floating point unit. It represents a fourth generation of binary compatible CPUs since the original 8086 of 1978. A 50 MHz 80486 executed around 40 million instructions per second on average and was able to reach 50 MIPS peak. The i486 was without the usual 80-prefix because of a court ruling that prohibited trademarking numbers (such as 80486). Later, with the introduction of the Pentium brand, Intel began branding its chips with words rather than numbers.

Pentium Pro
The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel introduced in November 1995. It introduced the P6 microarchitecture (sometime referred as i686) and was originally intended to replace the original Pentium in a full range of applications. While the Pentium and Pentium MMX had 3.1 and 4.5 million transistors, respectively, the Pentium Pro contained 5.5 million transistors. Later, it was reduced to a more narrow role as a server and high-end desktop processor and was used in supercomputers like ASCI Red. The Pentium Pro was capable of both dual- and quadprocessor configurations. It only came in one form factor, the relatively large rectangular Socket 8. The Pentium Pro was succeeded by the Pentium II Xeon in 1998.

Pentium II
The Pentium II[1] brand refers to Intel's sixth-generation microarchitecture ("P6") and x86-compatible microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997. Containing 7.5 million transistors, the Pentium II featured an improved version of the first P6-generation core of the Pentium Pro, which contained 5.5 million transistors. However, its L2 cache subsystem was a downgrade when compared to Pentium Pros. In early 1999, the Pentium II was superseded by the Pentium III. In 1998, Intel stratified the Pentium II family by releasing the Pentium II-based Celeron line of processors for low-end workstations and the Pentium II Xeon line for servers and high-end workstations. The Celeron was characterized by a reduced or omitted (in some

cases present but disabled) on-die full-speed L2 cache and a 66 MT/s FSB. The Xeon was characterized by a range of full-speed L2 cache (from 512 KB to 2048 KB), a 100 MT/s FSB, a different physical interface (Slot 2), and support for symmetric multiprocessing.

Pentium III
The Pentium III[1] brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile microprocessors based on the sixth-generation P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 26, 1999. The brand's initial processors were very similar to the earlier Pentium II-branded microprocessors. The most notable difference was the addition of the SSE instruction set (to accelerate floating point and parallel calculations), and the introduction of a controversial serial number embedded in the chip during the manufacturing process

Pentium 4
Pentium 4 was a line of single-core desktop and laptop central processing units (CPUs), introduced by Intel on November 20, 2000[1] and shipped through August 8, 2008.[2] They had a 7th-generation x86 microarchitecture, called NetBurst, which was the company's first all-new design since the introduction of the P6 microarchitecture of the Pentium Pro CPUs in 1995. NetBurst differed from P6 (Pentium III, II, etc.) by featuring a very deep instruction pipeline to achieve very high clock speeds[3] (up to 3.8 GHz) limited only by TDPs reaching up to 115 W in 3.4 GHz 3.8 GHz Prescott and Prescott 2M cores.[4] In 2004, the initial 32-bit x86 instruction set of the Pentium 4 microprocessors was extended by the 64-bit x86-64 set. The performance difference between a Pentium III at 1.13 GHz and a Pentium 4 at 1.3 GHz would have been hardly noticeable. So the Pentium 4 clock frequency needs to be approximately 1.15 higher than a Pentium 3 to achieve the same performance. [5] The first Pentium 4 cores, codenamed Willamette, were clocked from 1.3 GHz to 2 GHz. They were released on November 20, 2000, using the Socket 423 system. Notable with the introduction of the Pentium 4 was the 400 MT/s FSB. It actually operated at 100 MHz but the FSB was quad-pumped, meaning that the maximum transfer rate was four times the base clock of the bus, so it was marketed to run at 400 MHz. The AMD Athlon's double-pumped FSB was running at 200 MT/s or 266 MT/s at that time. Pentium 4 CPUs introduced the SSE2 and, in the Prescott-based Pentium 4s, SSE3 instruction sets to accelerate calculations, transactions, media processing, 3D graphics, and games. Later versions featured Hyper-Threading Technology (HTT), a feature to make one physical CPU work as two logical CPUs. Intel also marketed a version of their low-end Celeron processors based on the NetBurst microarchitecture (often referred to as

Celeron 4), and a high-end derivative, Xeon, intended for multiprocessor servers and workstations. In 2005, the Pentium 4 was complemented by the Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition dual-core CPUs.

Itanium
Itanium ( /atenim/ eye-TAY-nee-m) is a family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Intel markets the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems. The architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and Intel. The Itanium architecture is based on explicit instruction-level parallelism, in which the compiler decides which instructions to execute in parallel. This contrasts with other superscalar architectures, which depend on the processor to manage instruction dependencies at runtime. Itanium cores up to and including Tukwila execute up to six instructions per clock cycle. The first Itanium processor, codenamed Merced, was released in 2001. Itanium-based systems have been produced by HP (the HP Integrity Servers line) and several other manufacturers. As of 2008, Itanium was the fourth-most deployed microprocessor architecture for enterprise-class systems, behind x86-64, IBM POWER, and SPARC.[1] The most recent processor, Tukwila, originally planned for release in 2007, was released on February 8, 2010.[2][3]

Itanium 2: 20022010
The Itanium 2 processor was released in 2002, and was marketed for enterprise servers rather than for the whole gamut of high-end computing. The first Itanium 2, code-named McKinley, was jointly developed by HP and Intel. It relieved many of the performance problems of the original Itanium processor, which were mostly caused by an inefficient memory subsystem. McKinley contained 221 million transistors (of which 25 million were for logic), measured 19.5 mm by 21.6 mm (421 mm2) and was fabricated in a 180 nm, bulk CMOS process with six layers of aluminium metallization.[35] In 2003, AMD released the Opteron, which implemented its 64-bit architecture (x86-64). Opteron gained rapid acceptance in the enterprise server space because it provided an easy upgrade from x86. Intel responded by implementing x86-64 in its Xeon microprocessors in 2004.[20]

Intel released a new Itanium 2 family member, codenamed Madison, in 2003. Madison used a 130 nm process and was the basis of all new Itanium processors until Montecito was released in June 2006. In March 2005, Intel announced that it was working on a new Itanium processor, codenamed Tukwila, to be released in 2007. Tukwila would have four processor cores and would replace the Itanium bus with a new Common System Interface, which would also be used by a new Xeon processor.[36] Later that year, Intel revised Tukwila's delivery date to late 2008.[37] In November 2005, the major Itanium server manufacturers joined with Intel and a number of software vendors to form the Itanium Solutions Alliance to promote the architecture and accelerate software porting.[38] The Alliance announced that its members would invest $10 billion in Itanium solutions by the end of the decade.[39] In 2006, Intel delivered Montecito (marketed as the Itanium 2 9000 series), a dual-core processor that roughly doubled performance and decreased energy consumption by about 20 percent.[40] Intel released the Itanium 2 9100 series, codenamed Montvale, in November 2007.[41] In May 2009 the schedule for Tukwila, its follow-on, was revised again, with release to OEMs planned for the first quarter of 2010.[2]